By: Sidharth PK

The airy Greek myth, with the amplified Roman verse, the Selene is a looming figure o’er the crust of centuries. The moon is indefinable light and mystery, with the macabre tales that unwraps it. In literature, romantic poetry with reference to Lord Byron, as he brings our attention through his famous poems, “So we’ll go no more a roving, by the light of the moon”. The moon is portrayed in the sense of a romantic overture and literature connects objects like moon, sun, water into a modest moving aspects.

Moon is an imagination in art and myth conveys a different meaning. The moon has life and it speaks to the neighbor earth. In ancient days, moonlight has given an effective guiding light to sea- farers, travelers and so for others. Dreams in psychology have a connection with the personification of moon, as the popular adage goes, once said by young kids “I want to catch the moon”, even songs are being composed to connect moon with ambition and dream. In Indian astronomy great legends like Aryabhata has calculated the orbit of moon and some other planets. In the west, scientists throughout the course of history, Galileo Galilee, Kepler’s mathematical calculus has given us with facts of the cosmos, to a wider extent. The story of moon and it’s myth as defined by the contemporaries is meaningful to today’s science.

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President Kennedy’s captivating speech “We choose to go to the moon” at Rice university is a moving attempt to make man’s mission to the moon possible. But JFK couldn’t live up to see his dream coming true. With his untimely assassination at Dallas Texas street in 1963, his successor Lyndon B Johnson took the mission to limelight. Astronauts Neil Armstrong stepped out, becoming the first ever man to walk on moon. Nasa celebrated it as a unique event in history. It is man’s confidence that builds and counts, as Ralph Waldo Emerson points out “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm”. Indian ISRO, has also made in recent years’ tremendous achievements and accomplishments. India’s outer space story is scripted by the tireless effort by late APJ Abdul Kalam. Literature and scientific enquiry cannot go hand in hand, as both are extremes, with one requires your reason to be top of everything and other needs the emotion to be fueled. As today the moon is not far away from man’s reach, with the technological advancement and progress of society.

(The author is a young writer, columnist/ poet from Kochi/ Kerala.)